What a visitor's money does in Switzerland: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Swiss Franc (CHF) · 1 CHF = 1.07 EUR · 1 CHF = 1.22 USD
Francs, not euros — though most tourist businesses accept euros at a rate that is quietly terrible and give change in francs. Pay by card, which gives the real rate, and do not change money at the station.
Avoid: changing euros at the station, which is a poor rate
Use: UBS, PostFinance, Raiffeisen
Many businesses accept euros and give change in francs at a rate that quietly costs you five to ten per cent. Pay by card, which converts at the real rate.
Graubünden food: capuns, Bündnerfleisch — air-dried beef sliced thin — pizzoccheri, and barley soup. The town is a town rather than a resort, so there are ordinary restaurants and supermarkets, which is not true of most places in this guide.
Central Switzerland means Chügelipastete, a puff-pastry case of veal and mushrooms, and Älplermagronen — macaroni, potato, cheese and apple sauce, which sounds wrong and is a mountain classic. Lake fish, and Luzerner Lebkuchen for the journey home.
Bernese and hearty rather than refined: rösti with everything, älplermagronen — macaroni, potato, cheese and apple sauce — and meringue with Emmental double cream, which was invented in this canton. Everything on the mountain costs about half as much again as in the village.
Engadine and expensive: capuns, chard leaves rolled round spätzli dough; pizzoccheri from just over the Italian border; nusstorte, the walnut tart every bakery here makes. Pontresina and Samedan down the valley cost noticeably less for the same food.
Swiss and dear: fondue moitié-moitié, raclette from the Bagnes valley below, which is where raclette comes from, and dépouille sausage. Eating in Le Châble rather than up in the resort is the single biggest saving available here.
Valais food and good: raclette, dried meat, rye bread, and cholera — a pastry pie of potato, apple, cheese and leek with a name from the epidemic year it was invented in. The village restaurants are dear, as everywhere car-free tends to be.
Fondue and raclette are winter food and locals will tell you so, but every restaurant serves them year round to visitors. The better summer plate is rösti with an egg, or perch from the lake. Everything is expensive; a supermarket picnic from Coop is how the Swiss themselves eat on a mountain.
Valais is raclette country and the real version is scraped off a half wheel at the table, not poured from a machine. Cholera is a Valais pie of potato, apple and cheese with a strange name and a good filling. Fendant is the white wine, and the mountain huts pour it by the glass.
Zürcher Geschnetzeltes is veal in cream with rösti, and it is the dish. Luxemburgerli from Sprüngli are small macarons that do not travel. The city has an unexpected number of very good Italian restaurants, and the cheapest decent lunch is the mensa at the ETH, which is open to anyone.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
Interlaken & the Bernese OberlandSwitzerlandTwo lakes, three of the great north faces, and a railway that goes to 3,454 metres
ZermattSwitzerlandA car-free village under the most photographed mountain in the world, with skiing in every month
LucerneSwitzerlandA painted wooden bridge over a green river, a lake with steamers on it, and two mountains at the end of the line
GrindelwaldSwitzerlandA village under the north face of the Eiger, with a railway that climbs inside the mountain to the highest station in Europe
ZurichSwitzerlandA banking city with a swimmable river through the middle of it, and a lake that turns into a beach in July
St. MoritzSwitzerlandThe resort that invented winter tourism in 1864 on a bet, in a high dry valley where they race horses on the frozen lake and the sun shines about three hundred days a year
VerbierSwitzerlandA sunny terrace above the Rhône valley with the steepest lift-served terrain in Switzerland behind it, and the Freeride World Tour finishes here for a reason
Saas-FeeSwitzerlandA car-free village in a bowl with thirteen four-thousand-metre peaks standing round it and a glacier that skis all summer
DavosSwitzerlandThe highest town in Europe, built as a tuberculosis sanatorium in thin dry air, now five separate ski mountains and a conference nobody local enjoys